The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

  “You have been cheating on us.” Stanton shakes his head. “If only you’d been honest. Then we would have understood better this problem with George Stemmler.”

  George wracks his brain. What could he have to do with anything? Stemmler, a kid, but already a program officer. Two floors down, Sustainable Agriculture. With that hippie seashell bracelet peeking out from underneath his suit jacket, rendering the lifestyle signification of both the jacket and the bracelet ridiculous. He hardly knows the guy.

  “Audrey deserves—” George begins, and hears how her name hangs in the air like a mourner’s cry, how his sentence will not finish.

  “Did you send this e-mail to George?” Daniels asks, leaning over his purple sock to hand George another piece of paper, dated several months back.

  From: George Somner

  Date: Mon, June 18 at 11:09 AM

  Subject: asdfasfdkjdkldj

  To: georgestemmler@hudstanton.org

  The QUEEN sings {suggestion for Vijay: Cavatina}

  Build a fence around the gypsy where you find him on your lot. Build a fence around the gypsy, while he steals and schemes. / Look where the gypsy stakes his tent, to the moss he lays his head for he knows deep into the ground, the fruitful water-lands. / Wise nations! Listen for the gypsy / for every sound he makes—the shucking knife, the creaking wheel—sing out a murderous song: / beware the land that’s common, where still the flocks may graze, for soon it will be barren, and shepherds will be beggars too

  “I sent it to myself. I think it’s very good.”

  “But you sent it to George.”

  “I sent it to George instead of myself?”

  “To Stemmler.”

  “The address line, see?”

  “So I did.”

  “George brought it to HR right away,” Stanton says, speaking more slowly than Daniels.

  “Why did he bring it to HR?”

  Daniels holds his hand up, toward Stanton, to indicate Let me.

  “He felt the content was unsavory. But, he was uncomfortable knowing it wasn’t meant for him. He was torn. He didn’t want to cause you embarrassment over something private. He says he won’t mention it to anyone or speak against you in any way.”

  “Good man,” Stanton says, petting the dog.

  “So, George and HR agreed. As he refused to file a complaint, and as it was your first strike, it went in the file and would only be brought to bear if other issues arose. But in light of the rest—”

  “What rest?” George asks. “Maybe you don’t know how to read composition, maybe you don’t know what you’re holding, but there is nothing wrong with that. It’s part of a greater work. I’ve heard that text sung in rehearsal fifty times this month alone and it is beautiful and it’s right, and it’s none of your concern!”

  “So you concur you’ve missed more than a few days here and there,” Daniels says mildly.

  “George,” Stanton says, “this material isn’t fitting for our officer in charge of culture grants.”

  “You can see that, from where you are,” Daniels adds pleasantly, as if he’s pointing out a butterfly nestled in a flower.

  “But the villain sings it!” George cries. “The villain!”

  “Sometimes the villain and the hero are one and the same,” Daniels says.

  “This is where we part ways,” Stanton says. “I’m sorry, George.”

  “Sometimes the villain and the hero are the same? They are not the same. There is no same! Any third grader will tell you they’re opposites. This is a vision of the world gone wrong! Not an endorsement, a warning! I want to talk to the new guy. I want to tell him a thing or two about loyalty and how not to waste it here. I guess you’re giving him my office. I guess that’s the big surprise. The new guy is me.”

  “No. He’s more senior,” Daniels says, the Android back between his thumbs. “We’re reevaluating on a macro level. We haven’t decided if your funding will remain or be assimilated into other programs.”

  “Assimilated? Oh, consultants! You viruses of nothing, you—”

  “Enough,” Stanton says. “Thank you for your service, George, I mean that. Thank you. Ma-rie,” he calls to the outer office, “Mr. Somner is ready to go. Get him a water.”

  Marie pops her silver head around the door and gives George a tight, heard-everything smile. She stretches out her hand, clutched around a bottle of water and a limp paper napkin. Betsy raises her head.

  “I’ll walk you,” Daniels says. “We’ll go over severance in your office.”

  George stands, nods his assent. The fight’s gone out of him. He feels exhausted and forlorn and sure he shouldn’t touch anything, like a child left in a store. He will not cry, he will not cry. He will not take the water.

  Audrey’s desk is more tidily arranged than usual. Her light and monitor are off.

  “Sent her home,” Daniels says, following his gaze.

  “She knew? Will she get to keep her job?”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  An hour later Daniels and the corporate counsel that joined them have left with his signature in triplicate, with instruction not to contact anyone—grantee or affiliate—under penalty of suit and potential loss of compensation still due. George could see that Daniels could see that George was properly defeated and wouldn’t make any troublesome phone calls. They agreed to leave him alone to pack up. He sits at his desk. He doesn’t call Iris. He sits beyond the lights being dimmed in the hall. For the last time, out his window he watches the gold reflection of the sunset in the fins of the Chrysler Building. A woman pushing a cart enters to empty his trash bin. She wears blaring headphones and appears surprised but not interested to see him.

  “You want I empty?” She gestures to the trash basket under the desk. Before he answers, she wrests the bin from between his feet and tips out its only item, the to-go cappuccino cup. She returns the basket and turns her cart around. The music leaking from her headphones is a hard, generic, danceable Eastern Europop. He hunts around in his pockets. Empty. No pill to cheer him up in his bag, either. He pats his hands deep into the back of each of his empty desk drawers. He stretches his arms in an awkward embrace around the pile in front of him—his copy of the severance contract and his heavy leather appointment book and his grandfather’s box of snuff and the beautiful letter opener shaped like Brancusi’s Bird in Space. He turns away from the glow of the adulterous computer. He rests his cheek on the cool shellac of the desk.

  22

  Walk, stay—these words came into her mind that first day at Oak Park, when she put herself in the supply closet. How embarrassing that was. She thought it was a room and that she’d find a telephone and call for the car. Stay—when she heard George squeeze in behind her wheelchair. She didn’t have time to reverse. “You don’t want to live in here, do you?” he’d said, almost gently. She’d clamped her mouth and looked at her hands on the rubber handles. Nothing to be said to nothing.

  Every few weeks she takes a phone call from Pat, from Nan, from Esme and Annie. She tells them all is well. She’ll be home soon. Brief and cheerful and nothing about the pneumonia. They must not suspect how reduced her circumstances are, how she is afraid. The less they know, the less it can be true.

  Toto used to say, “Please walk me to the corner, Cecilia,” her Irish accent buoyant and stern. Or “Walk your old Toto into the park.” Halfway along shouting, “Stay!” Startling and hilarious. In the beginning, to teach CeCe to mind the curb. Later, to make them laugh. CeCe was nine when the United States declared victory over Japan, and Toto (properly, Miss Moira Quinn) deemed CeCe old enough to join the crowds. For an hour they walked south, to Times Square, the scraps of cloth and ticker tape thicker and thicker under their feet. They jostled in among the revelers. Toto laughed with a stranger, something CeCe had never seen her do. Adults so happy it was frightening. A man lifted CeCe up and Toto said, “Stay,” in a different voice. When she was done scolding the man, CeCe screwed up the co
urage to ask if her mother could finally come home.

  “What’s this now?” Toto asked, leaning the starched wall of her torso to Cecilia, the crowd flowing around them.

  “Mata Hari” was all CeCe could say, staring at her patent shoes. She’d learned the story of the female spy from a joke her father told. She didn’t understand the joke, but she divined the truth: her mother was a spy. Evelyn had gone away just after the invasion of Poland. She returned to visit only twice, and with many other people always in the room. So beautiful! Never saying anything, but with the feeling of something important to say. What else but great sacrifice could explain why Evelyn left, and left again? Each mission more daring than the last. CeCe had kept her mother’s secret. This made CeCe a hero of the war too.

  “Dear little lady,” Toto said. “Poor little-little, no. Your mother loves you as I do. She’s no sinful woman like that Mata Hari. Who’s been telling you stories?” Toto yanked CeCe back uptown. No walk, no stay.

  The Astrasyne had been working. Sorrow, to have her progress smacked away by pneumonia! Now, when walking is difficult, her mind taps and drags with her feet, walk-me-stay-walk-me-stay, as she moves from bed to chair, from chair to hall, from hall to garden, from garden to lake. “A beautiful garden, a beautiful lake,” someone is always saying—a nurse, a physical therapist. Yes, she nods, but she doesn’t care to reply. Walk me—at the oddest times, the plaint loops and insists upon her sanity (binding her to sanity, or rasping sanity from her, hard to say), and its sound is odd too: the hush of Toto, faint for all the years.

  By her fourth week on the drug, her limbs shook less. The pins and needles still rushed up her legs, but not as often and not as hot. The muscles in her legs connected one to the next. By the seventh week on the drug, her neck had uncoiled. Like magic, one morning in the mirror her head and neck rose out of her body like a new flower in a vase. Was it later that day or the next came the fever? Fever, and falling out of time and place, tumbling down the dark where no one could follow. She’s recovering well. The doctors remind her. But she’s weak. Breathless over nothing. George doesn’t even know. Not because she’s pretended to be fine, but because he doesn’t call.

  Dr. Adams, who is now her primary physician—the dismal young resident dispatched—says her treatment is back on course. But, to have gathered this second illness to herself, to be moved by any passing current like a frail curtain, is dispiriting. She wouldn’t have contracted pneumonia outside Oak Park. It’s the hospital bed and the doctors that are responsible for her needing the hospital bed and the doctors! When they visit her room, it takes a rousing of deceitful gusto to hide how much she hates them, and as she listens and smiles, she can feel her bitterness shrinking and tightening her features into her head like bright screws. To be so agreeable fatigues the soul. Yet as soon as they leave, she wishes them back. Out the window, an undecided sky, the color of weak tea. It’s still morning. The nurse has come and gone. It’s hot, not even close to lunchtime. CeCe is at the round table where she eats her meals. An outdated Time magazine is in front of her, its pages fluttered. She’s read it all. First only the parts she was interested in, then the rest. She wishes she had the newspaper. “Always so late bringing the paper,” she says, and her voice in the empty room chills her. No, self-pity is for the younger generation. For the younger generation, there’s self-regard and self-interest and self-reflection and self-promotion, in a sea of handheld devices.

  She will not feel sorry for herself. Instead, she will write Patricia a letter, tell her to come. It will take courage. She will forgive Patricia. It’s time. Forgive her for moving so far away without making it right between them. Forgive Pat for living on the West Coast and for sending flowers, flowers, flowers—this week, a fuchsia orchid with moss in the pot, like a business gift. Forgive Pat for not allowing more time for CeCe to get used to Lotta before they moved away. Anyone would need a moment to adjust to that Brazilian giant with the sneakers and the men’s crew cut and the men’s thin, gold-wire glasses and the custom dress shirts from London and the pretentiously outmoded black-and-white camera slung like a gun against her crushed and prodigious bosom! She will force herself to love Lotta. She’ll say to people, I love Lotta. Did you know our dear Lotta is a prominent architect? Did you know our family’s been tied to Brazil for over a hundred years, first by business, and now by love? She had at first wondered if Pat’s attraction to Lotta wasn’t an unthinking rehearsal, or did she mean reversal, of the Somners’ dark presence in that country. She will no longer allow herself such unkind thoughts about her daughter.

  Patricia must be showing. Nearly six months along? So old to be having a child. But! The birth of a grandchild may restore a family. She’ll avoid the phone, write her thoughts so her anger does not get ahead of her. (Her first call to Oak Park, the voice said, “Hey, it’s Pat,” and CeCe replied, “Pat who?”) She’ll forgive Patricia. Patricia will forgive her. The Astrasyne will cure her. She’ll leave Oak Park. Once she is settled back home, they’ll bring their new baby boy. She hopes it’s a boy, because isn’t it livelier when lesbians have boys? Pat and Lotta and the boy will visit her all the time. When they’re not visiting? There are so many books she hasn’t read. She’s never read Anna Karenina. She’s never read The Magic Mountain or Churchill’s letters to Clementine. Once, before they stopped speaking, Patricia told her to read Coetzee’s Disgrace. She hasn’t forgotten. She hasn’t read it, but she hasn’t forgotten. She’ll read Disgrace in her garden by the ocean. She’ll do some of the gardening herself. She’ll give Esme a little raise. She’ll buy Esme a little house. Maybe she’ll give Esme George’s house, to teach him a lesson. She’ll take trips into New York to see her old friends and go to the theater. Rejoin a board or two. She’ll take trips to the places she hasn’t been since she was a girl and trips to places she’s never seen. She’s never been to Egypt. The corrections she will make! She’ll take the Queen Mary 2 across the ocean, though she expects it’s not like the Queen Mary of her youth but rather a synthetically carpeted shitcan inhabited by the kind of tourist who wabbles about the deck clinging to his baseball cap and a sandwich, its stuffed lettuces flapping in the headwind. Yes, she’ll be open-minded. She is open-minded! When winter comes, she’ll stay at home and have fires built in the living room. She’ll huddle the chairs around the fire. The chairs, as she currently has them arranged, are too far away from each other. She’ll lean over spiced hot chocolate to listen with great appreciation to whoever is to be her company. She will, she will—she will stand by a tree in a snow-covered field. She’ll set off across the field making footprints, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her coat. She’s not had the balance to walk with her hands in the pockets of her coat in a long time. She wants to let winter into her lungs and she wants to hear winter under her shoe and she wants to stand inside the bright made by the snow and not be dying and not be dead.

  No. She can’t bear to write Patricia this morning. What she needs is exercise. Her eye falls on her new walking stick. It leans beside the door. The landscaper made it for her, cut a branch not far from her window and made it smooth and level. Those first days she was recovering from the pneumonia—“We haven’t connected with your son. Is there anyone else you’d like us to try?”—the landscaper made it a part of his day to check on her, by passing her window and glancing in. She suspects that since she called to him for help, he’s felt a minor responsibility for her welfare, as if by doing her one favor he owes her another. She began raising her hand hello whenever he appeared. Even when she was tired, each morning she took the ghastly walker to the garden’s closest bench, hoping he’d be by. The other day, surprising herself, she called to him from the bench, “Where are you from?” From Yemen. He told her his name, Yasser, and that he has a son and a daughter, “this high, and this high.” He flies back twice a year to see them.

  “I also have a son and a daughter, this high, and this high.” She raised her twitchy hand as high as it would go. He looked down at h
er—right into her eyes—and said, “I’ll make you a stick,” and the way her heart knocked it was as if she’d fallen in love.

  She looks out the window but doesn’t see him. For a few days, she’s listened to them again pruning the trees with the chain saw across the lake, too far for her to walk. Nothing left but to go find Dotty. She gropes her way past the wheelchair, folded against the wall—bedeviling, relentlessly leaning there, like a person waiting for her to make conversation. Today is a good day—she rejects the walker too, with the ironic horror that is the addition of bright green tennis balls to its feet. She takes the stick. She ejects herself into the hall. For some time there’s nothing but air vents and the bar to steady her hand. She peers into the open rooms as she staggers past—the patients lumped under the sheets like gray octopuses—that can’t be good. Farther down, she passes a room from which she hears an unusual commotion, a large man with a sparse white beard flung on the wave of seizure. Someone inside closes the door. She’s never seen that before. More closed doors—145, 147, 149, the numbers shuttling away until she reaches the stark little gym with the wall of glass. She waves to the two women who walk a steep incline on the treadmills, who she’s seen walking behind the glass all the days before. She reaches the bulletin board. Activities sheets and smiling photos of the physical therapists, with one or two salient details—“Did you know Inez plays the ukulele?”—pinned beside. Down, down, down. A purple-faced man shuffles toward her, gingerly escorting a mobile IV, eyeing the rod and bag as if it’s a spirit companion he can’t believe has chosen to walk the earth beside him. She is obliged to step out of his way. Water for the ghosts, another unlikely phrase that loops her thoughts. She wonders how her mind’s underground stream—when the bucket is lowered, she is no longer sure what will be pulled back up. Like—shitcan—where had that come from, so obscene, so unlike her? The man with the IV turns through a door that someone’s opened from within. A visitor’s pocketbook hangs on a chair.